Hard-Boiled Jews

In his new novel, Michael Chabon imagines a world where Sitka, Alaska is the new Jewish homeland.

Michael Chabon has a problem with growing up. Not that his talent isn't full-fledged. But whether he's writing about middle-aged stoners (Wonder Boys) or genius comic-book artists (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), he's always wondering what it means to be an adult, a real writer. Does it mean he has to give up believing in superheroes?

In The Yiddish Policemen's Union (HarperCollins, $27), he once again sets out to tackle the hardest questions -- about American promise, the nature of belonging, and the possibility of redemption -- by harnessing the energy of a somewhat disregarded, some might say adolescent, genre. In this case, pulp detective novels. His leading man, Meyer Landsman, is a direct descendant of Philip Marlowe, a beaten-down, beaten-up antihero who gropes for the truth in a fog of alcohol and lies. If you've ever seen film noir, you know what's in store for Landsman: He gets lied to, threatened, held prisoner, blackjacked, and shot.

Yet if Chabon is channeling Raymond Chandler, he's also doing something much more difficult and rewarding, because the mean streets Landsman patrols aren't in L.A.; they're in Sitka, Alaska, a decaying metropolis inhabited by millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews. We gradually discover that just as Philip Roth tweaked the outcome of history in The Plot Against America, Chabon has played his own trick: He imagines that Sitka, not Israel, was declared the Jewish homeland after World War II.

Chabon clearly had a lot of fun inventing Sitka, a city brimming with characters as obsessively imagined as any in a teenager's fantasy world. It's this playfulness that keeps his Yiddish dream from sinking into mere sepia-toned nostalgia.

Yet the question lingers: Should Chabon be read with a straight face or an indulgent grin?